As long as you are searching for happiness, you will remain unhappy. UG

Somehow, over the last 40 years or so, I seem to have stumbled upon more than my fair share of gurus and spiritual practices: Transcendental Meditation, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetics, Lifespring, Arica, TORI, On Having No Head, Context, Eckankar, Eknath Easwaran, Enlightenment Intensives, the Camino de Santiago, Sufism, the Fischer-Hoffman Process, Rinzai, Korean and Soto Zen … and probably a few more that came and went, leaving barely a blip on my befuddled brain.

Each, in its own flavored way, blessed and encouraged me on life’s tangled journey, each with its own particular gifts and challenges, each leaving me slightly discombobulated and dissatisfied. Not that I’m complaining – collectively they’ve brought me to “here,” and here rocks. I got exactly what I deserved. Maybe I needed to go through the many and various “spiritual” processes to attain my present degree of skepticism. (Quotes around spiritual, since it seems to me that either everything is spiritual or nothing is.)

There came a point, a few years ago, when the obvious finally dawned on me: my search was my problem. Looking back, the common ground between these various practices is that there was always a quid pro quo. Do this (meditation, dyads, studying, chanting, yoga) and you’ll attain this (happiness, enlightenment, self-knowledge, wisdom). To put it bluntly, they were all selling dissatisfaction. No one – almost no one – said, “You’re OK as you are. You’ll only mess yourself up if you try to be someone else.”

It’s the American Way, of course: happiness will come (and pain fade away) if only you buy/drive/eat/drink/wear this. You can be like the model in the ad, or the enlightened being in front of you, if you do what they’re telling or selling you. My experience is that such happiness lasts about five minutes before I start second-guessing it or wanting more. This human brain is far better adapted for chronic distraction than chronic contentment.

I said “almost no one.” There are a couple of exceptions, people who remind us to live in the present with what we actually have, rather than look forward to a better future. Shunryu Suzuki, for instance, one of the founders of Soto Zen on the West Coast, famously said, “You’re perfect as you are…” (Unfortunately for subsequent generations of students, he added, “…and you can always use a little improvement.”)

Steven Harrison’s first book is called Doing Nothing, in which he writes, “…we will find the truths of life not through any process, philosophy, or religion, but through the simple act of stopping the search.” (But then in this and several subsequent books, Steven—a truly lovely man—expounds on how exactly to do that!)

Then there’s that arch-discombobulater, the late UG (Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti, no relation to the better-known teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti). UG’s writings (rather, his listeners’ transcripts of his Q&A sessions) are a constant source of delight for someone like me who is (kinda-sorta) of done with looking to the future for happiness (while realizing, of course, the paradox of reading him for enjoyment!). To give you a flavor, here’s some UG-isms:

As soon as you introduce the question “how to live?” you have made of life a problem.

The mind has invented both religion and dynamite to protect what it regards as its best interests.

All meditation can do is take us to new and more interesting ways of being unhappy.

###

Barry Evans gave the best years of his life to civil engineering, and what thanks did he get? In his dotage, he travels, kayaks, meditates and writes for the Journal and the Humboldt Historian. He sucks at 8 Ball. Buy his Field Notes anthologies at any local bookstore. Please.